April 30, 1975
Page 12562
Mr. MONDALE. I would be honored.
I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from West Virginia be added as a cosponsor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. MONDALE. The other day the Senator from West Virginia may recall, because it had his support, we passed my amendment which created a program very similar to the Homeowners Loan Corporation. It is estimated that it will cost about $315 million to save 300,000 to 400,000 homeowners from the loss of their homes. The money will be used and it must be repaid. We need it now to save those homes from foreclosure, from driving out people who were working, who were keeping up payments, but who lost their jobs and have no way to continue their home payments. We must keep them in their homes and see that they are not forced out of their homes.
The $300 million that we authorized is not in this budget. If we sustain the ceiling in this budget, we will be unable to appropriate the money to save the homes of 300,000 or 400,000 Americans.
Mr. RANDOLPH. Mr. President, what the Senator says is true. I have no desire to be facetious in the telling of this story, but sometimes small boys are given to boasting about their fathers. One boy said, "My father is going to build a big house and it is going to have a flagpole on top of it."
The second boy said, "My father is going to build a big house and he is going to place a tower on top of it." The third boy thought he had the answer for both other boys, of course, and he said, "My father is really going to have a big house and he is going to have a mortgage on it."
I tell you, that is what is happening in millions of cases in this country. It is a big mortgage and it is a big obligation that we have to do something about these problems, these priorities, these urgencies which are near at home. I do not want to go into foreign aid again as it is unnecessary, but I repeat that the billions and billions of dollars not spent in the conflict in Southeast Asia, but the billions and billions of dollars spent in country after country, in area after area of the world do bring us up short to our responsibility to provide here at home.
Mr. MONDALE. I agree completely with the Senator from West Virginia. I am pleased by his contribution.
Mr. MUSKIE. Will the Senator yield at that point?
Mr. MONDALE. I am pleased to yield to the Senator from Maine.
Mr. MUSKIE. I do not intend to interrupt the presentation, but I do want to make the point that the Senator from Minnesota and the Senator from West Virginia speak as though if and when we approve an outlay ceiling of $365 billion, as recommended in the Budget Committee's resolution, that everything under it is frozen in concrete.
That is not so at all. I would be amazed if the Senator from Minnesota supports appropriations for defense at the figure assumed in the Budget Committee's resolution, $91.2 billion. The Senator voted for a $90 billion ceiling for defense in the Budget Committee.
When the Senator says that there will not be a penny to do this, that, or the other, I can only suggest to him, and to other Senators, that depending upon how they feel bound by the functional totals assumed in the committee report, there is room for differences of opinion as to how those dollars are going to be spent.
Let us take the comments of the Senator from West Virginia, that he would like to take $200 or $300 million for this emergency housing program out of foreign aid.
Well, there is $200 to $300 million in the Budget Committee's resolution assumed for continuing assistance to Southeast Asia, because the resolution was completed before the events of yesterday. That money is still there under the total of $365 billion. The Senator from West Virginia presumably, given his argument this afternoon, would spend it for that purpose.
One of the purposes of this ceiling is to impose restraint on the overall spending so that Members will be forced to consider their own priorities and undertake to squeeze out of programs which have a low priority, from their point of view, the resources necessary to support programs which they feel have a high priority.
There is no way for any committee, the Budget Committee or any other committee, to reflect in a $365 billion outlay ceiling, or a $374 billion outlay ceiling, the priorities of every Member of this Senate. The best that we can do is to come up with a total that accommodates the reasonable priorities of a consensus of the Senate.
Not only can Members find additional resources by raising the ceiling, but they can find resources by reordering the priorities. Every Member is going to vote his priorities on these appropriations bills.
I simply do not buy the argument we are beginning to hear that there will not be a penny for this or there will not be a penny for that.
There is one other argument I make later and not now, because it take some time, in response to the argument of the Senator from Minnesota that there is only $4.5 billion that related to the country's needs to deal with the recession. There is substantially more I will go into that in greater detail later.